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soliti · 5 years ago

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ASTRID SWAN

1. Taylor Swift: Folklore (2020, album) This year the so-called mainstream and the sidelines flow into each other. There are no borders between formula, selling, style and that is freeing for all who make art. Maybe in that sense a global pandemic is putting us on a more even creative keel. It’s providing time for all to actually make art rather than to focus on its marketing. Maybe. Taylor Swift’s first quarantine album became my favorite immediately. I have had it on probably every day for the past months. The marriage of Aaron Dessner’s delicate looping swirling riffs with Swift’s sugary pop vocal hooks and storytelling were just what I needed for inspiration and comfort while sitting at my desk, staring at the screen, writing and glimpsing the sky each day, through the seasons.

2. Beyoncé: The Lion King – The Gift (2020, visual album) The visual album directed by Bey herself is another border breaking effort, questioning the imagined fencing between super fame and unknown artists, elevating the African continents, black and brown humans and culture and healing with beauty. The music relates to the Lion King film that came out in 2019 and so does the film, but its free too, writing and rewriting additional meanings, imagining differently. It’s abundance, shared space, nature, form – an amazing fiction and a powerful narrative to black and brown children: you matter, you are beautiful. My 8-year-old LOVES every second of it. It is radical to be one of the most famous identifiable voices in pop and to share the vocal space and songwriting with all these other voices. It is radical to believe in your own power to do many things well, and then do it.

3. Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020, album) What a year! It feels like I am 17 again with all these albums that become part of my musical interior. My new, yet familiar furniture to lean on. Apple’s album is an amalgamation of all her albums so far. It’s a language I speak. It’s like listening to my big sister. It makes me glad to be alive in 2020 to hear her be able to bottle the vulnerability and wit and shake shake shake…

4. Shawn Colvin: Diamond in the Rough (book, 2012) I read a lot this year, which is no news. I’m always reading. Still, this is a revelation: since 2018 I’ve been listening to Colvin’s album A Few Small Repairs from 1996 every week. Yes, every week at some point I have to listen to this. This relates to the fact that I’ve rediscovered a lot of my 90s favorites and realized that I still love them. So, finally I realized that she published a memoir in 2012. I loved reading this book because it hasn’t been so long that I can read books by women songwriters. There just haven’t been that many. And this one addressed song writing and the conditions of her becoming a musician very well. It also dealt with alcoholism, mental health struggles and weaved mothering, romantic love and parental love into the narrative. Again, reading this inspired me to do what I do. Her writing made me feel less lonely and inspired to play the guitar again.

5. Hari Kunzru: Into the Zone (podcast) Podcasts have become an almost too present noise in my mornings, my walks, my cooking, my escape from the family… in a small home with everyone home, you can make space by listening to your own boring talk shows so loud that it drowns out Neil Young and muddles YouTube kids and the endless video game or Lego reviews. So, I discovered Into the Zone. I love it passionately. It’s a literary writer’s and a researcher’s dream. Kunzru is able to tell narratives of far apart subjects and show how they relate and influence each other. He talks much about music, racism, ideas of genre, imagined futures… to be honest, I felt like writing a letter of thank you to him, that’s how much I loved this. I haven’t written the letter though, because I could not find his email address.

6. “How to Stop a Power Grab” by Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker. November 23rd, 2020. This great article looks into what we know about peaceful dissent, interviewing Erica Chenoweth who is an important voice for all kinds of civil organizing and dissent such as the Black Lives Matter -movement. Chenoweth has studied and found that peaceful dissent is more likely to lead to political change than violence. Her book with Maria Stephan Why Civil Resistance Works came out in 2013 and is considered a watershed book for civil organizing. Reading this article gave me hope; maybe instead of a major global disaster bigger than 2020, we are learning, we are on the brink of better times, of realizing that we all have to care for all and act upon the betterment of our conditions. That science is showing us that violence is a dead end. That things are changing. That from the perspective of centuries, our slow learning is accelerating.

7. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (TV Series, HBO) Michelle McNamara’s book by the same name was a hit a little while ago and this year, the HBO documentary series brings the entangled narratives of McNamara, the horrific victim stories and the story of the EAR/Night Stalker together much like the book. The criminal titled EAR who violated the lives of so many and killed many from 1960s until recently in California, USA is kind of at the center of the story, but also, he is a side character to something more interesting. For me, the true crime aspect of this program was not as compelling as the story of McNamara’s discovery of writing, her ability to fuse detective skills and storytelling and her inability to address her personal struggles while doing it. It is a tragedy. I was struck by the documentary’s skill at talking also about mothering, a romantic relationship and childhood and to relate all this to the way this woman worked, developed her professional situation. And all this, while investigating murders and rapes that happened long ago and were never solved. Watching this made me a fangirl of McNamara and it made me want to become an amateur sleuth and also a filmmaker in my next life. Finally, during the year I fluctuated between wanting to watch old films, familiar series and yearning to be shook out of my usual corners. Being true crime this series was super scary for me – but it was more about telling stories really than about the crime, so I grit my teeth and closed the blinds and told myself I’m safe and I watched the series twice already. Guardian review of the show.

#astrid swan #soliti #end of year lists #2020

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